


I ask, what does the nightingale see?

by Baryshnikov



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Birds, Blood, Character Death, Dark, Dark Harry Potter, Dark Spring Vibes, Falling In Love, Hallucinations, Harry/Tom is the main pairing, Insanity, Kissing, Loneliness, M/M, Mirrors, Murder, Not Epilogue Compliant, Poisoning, Purposelessness, Suicide Attempt, Tom starts off non-sentient, True Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2019-11-28 05:57:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18204440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov
Summary: Harry moved to the secluded cottage to find a purpose, and perhaps, unfortunately, he found one, just not the one everyone had hoped for.





	1. How did we end up here?

The air was cold against Harry’s red-stained hands, despite the fact it was nearly April. Outside the window, the world was dipped in pink and grey, the same as it always was. Just asphalt and candyfloss clouds swirling and swarming like insects above him. But that was still better than the city. Endless quiet would always be better than the never-ending hum of city-life, hearing nothing but the birds chirping, and the wind filtering through the trees was far nicer than the loudness of people, their endless chatter that seemed to permeate into the very fabric of the large concrete Molochs that crowned the city streets. That was why he was here. To enjoy the peace of silence, to relax, to get used to not having a shadow that followed him wherever he went. It was harder than Harry had expected to accept the lifting of the weight from his shoulders. All the tension and fear and paranoia that had spread through him, infecting him and burrowing ever so deep like maggots in a corpse, had vanished, and Harry now felt too light. It was as though he was floating above his body, talking and listening to endless people, but not there in spirit, not really there at all. The simple problem was that the war had been won quicker than he’d imagined, and suddenly he had been purposeless. His entire life had built to that one short moment, and then he was seventeen with no plan, no reason to live. He was just existing then, drifting through the void watching other people achieve other things. Being proud of them whilst feeling so empty, so hollow, so meaningless. Eventually, people had had enough, they’d told him to go away for a while, a change of atmosphere, a change of lifestyle, it might lead to something good. Ron had said to go somewhere quiet and secluded, somewhere peaceful where he could truly be alone, and could figure out who he really was when someone wasn’t latched onto his soul, slowly leeching the life out of him. When he knew who he was, maybe he’d know what he wanted to do with the rest of his life Hermione had said, and that was why he was here. A secluded cottage that stood stark against the unceasing patchwork of fields and hedgerows and copses. A genuinely isolated place, large enough for two people, but comfortable for one, filled low ceilings and dried flowers of whoever had been there before, it was a pleasant place to spend some time learning who he really was. 

That was over a year ago. Harry was still there now, still watching the seasons pass in an infinite cycle: the grass grew taller and the small stream that ran nearby grew smaller, then the leaves would start to fall and they’d clog the channels with their red and orange bodies, then the snow would come, falling slow and thick in the bitter cold, and then it would be spring all of a sudden, like it was now, and the flowers would be blooming and the birds would be singing again. Harry liked the changing of the seasons, for it was limitless, endless, ceaseless. They gave time a measure, a reason, helped him more than any calendar would, to keep a track of the constant flow of crammed-empty days, each that used to be tinged with the same shade of grey. The longer he had stayed the more the letters from friends had dwindled, they still came of course, but infrequently, and always filled with news and achievements, sometimes photographs, sometimes not. In his letters back, Harry always thanked and congratulated and signed his name. He never mentioned when he was coming home, even if they asked because he didn’t know if he even wanted to come home anymore. Here felt like home now, here with the cold air and the pink asphalt sky, and his red hands, and something else. 

Harry did not write about this new something because even if his friends understood, they certainly wouldn’t approve. For here alongside him was Tom, as strange as it seemed. At first, he had merely been a presence, a feeling that clung to the air nevermind the weather. The clamminess of the cold and the sensations that buzzed before the rain started falling. That was how it began. Harry couldn’t remember how many months he’d spent watching the sky, watching the rain pitter-pattering against the ground, watching the snow floating like ghosts on their way to smothering the soil, all because he felt something was in the water when it fell from the heavens. Felt _someone_ was just hovering in his periphery, somehow both in and out of sight. A constant presence with no substance to speak of. Harry would never admit to it, but in the emptiness, he spoke to the silence, and sometimes he swore the silence spoke back. That his name would carry on the wind and slide through the trees, and he would hear it so loud echoing around the walls. Sometimes he would go out and stand in the rain, feel it soaking his clothes and sinking straight to his bones, the chill settling in like a rot, never to be removed no matter how hard he tried. All in the hope of catching a single syllable of his name. To hear it, to understand it, to know who said it. But standing there, under the apple tree looking out into the haze, there was no one, there was always no one. That didn’t stop him though, and every time he thought he heard his name on the breeze something would compel him outside into the chill of the rain or the cold sunlight, and he would stare at the horizon expecting to see the figure that called to him. All he ever saw though, was a nightingale sitting on a fencepost, watching with its knowing black eyes. The song of that nightingale seemed to be the musical illustration of his heart, just a sweet little song that accompanied him all day long. It was beautiful in a way, so simple, organic, a reminder of the perfection that he lived amongst, so far from true civilisation. Though at the same time, it reminded him just how lonely he was, how empty his life had become, that it was just him and the nightingale inhabiting it. Or that was how it had been. 

Harry could still remember, as clear as day when he first saw Tom in the mirror. He’d walked into the sitting room and glanced in the mirror above the fireplace and there had been Tom’s reflection sitting in the spare chair. Harry had frozen, both his body and breath fixed for a moment, unable to move, unable to do anything. Before he snapped out of it and hastily turned towards the chair, it was empty and untouched. When he turned back to the mirror, Tom was gone, but his heart was still pounding twice-pace.   
Despite what his eyes saw, Harry had convinced himself that it was the light and the damp and the nightingale that sung in Tom’s voice, which had persuaded him that he had seen things that he could not have done. That was a successful claim for a week before he’d seen Tom standing and smiling in his bedroom mirror. Perhaps he should have been scared, but Tom felt like an old friend – that’s what happened when people spent too long inside your head, they start to become your friends, even if you’ve never really met them. So, instead of looking behind him at the empty wall, Harry approached the mirror. Looking at Tom he had appeared, well, the same as ever. The same smile that still seemed to dig into Harry’s heart, the same eyes that so easily slid beneath his skin, the same everything that Harry had felt before. Though, even he was surprised by how quickly the memories of Tom came back, how easily he himself let them slip back into his mind, filling it to the brim with thoughts and emotions that he’d never properly dissected; thoughts and emotions that now formed a strange incoherent mixture that threatened to spill right out through his mouth. For his part, Tom didn’t move from his apparent place against the dull yellow wall. He only tilted his head a little and seemed to will Harry closer, seemed to beg him to approach. Perhaps it was stupid, well it was, and Harry could hear everyone’s voice, collective in his head telling him to stop, to back away and cover all the mirrors, and then return to the city because he’d clearly been alone for too long. But he hadn’t. For reasons he didn’t try to justify to himself, Harry went right to the glass, close enough that his breath fogged the surface, and felt so cold beneath his fingers. It was then that Tom’s reflection moved. Walked towards him and stood as his mirror image, reflected back. Tom’s eyes had travelled slowly over Harry’s body, as though he was assessing him., for some unknown purpose. When Tom’s fingers eventually connected with the glass, Harry would have sworn he felt a heat in his fingertips as though there was really someone on the other side of the mirror. As they had stood there, ever so close, practically breathing in the fog of each other’s breath, Harry had counted every single second. Counted every single second that he felt Tom’s eyes burrowing into his own. Counted every single second that his heart thudded too heavy in his chest and breathing felt stupidly difficult. It was fifty-seven seconds before his eyes were burning. Fifty-seven seconds before he blinked and Tom was gone. Rationality kicked in an hour later, when he was still standing in front of that mirror. He’d gone around and covered every one with a blanket, and then sat at the table watching his tea go cold. 

The days following had been the most reflective of his life. Nothing woke him from his thoughts, not the hammering of the rain so loud that it was like roaring death, not the banging of the window shutter in the wind, not the slowly spreading damp that leaked in from the open window. Harry just sat and stared at the table, at the curves of the wood, tracing them with his finger and wondering whether the things he saw were real. He wouldn’t lie and say that Tom had never crossed his mind before this moment, because he had, he had a lot. At first, such thoughts were ones of natural curiosity, had he died? Was that what happened? Or was there another realm beyond theirs, one that was unpredictable, one that was completely unknown. The things that Tom had become were numerous and nasty, but corruption was such an easy disease to succumb to, Tom would not be the last to fall under its hypnotic spell. Sometimes, and Harry did not share this with anyone, he had felt that tug on his heart, that pull towards the darker things that seemed to offer greater promises than the light. There was a beauty to darkness, the things that should not be desired were, of course, the most desirable. Tom was the darkest thing he had ever known, and Harry suspected, the darkest thing he would ever know. Monsters did not emerge often from the depths of the world, he imagined the long crawl up from the nadirs of hell was arduous, and that only the most determined to ruin, would ever make it to the surface. Tom was, of course, determined, and intelligent and resolute, if there was ever a monster who was reluctant to die, it would be him. Though, that was not the only reason that Tom seemed to have occupied his thoughts so often. Whilst Harry had come here to the emptiness of the country to find himself, there were some things he knew before he left. He knew, for example, that there was something dangerously distracting about Tom’s jawline, and something so curiously gorgeous about his fingers. What he felt, he would not dare to define as love, because all the versions of Tom he had known were simply unlovable, but it was something, that was undeniable. An attraction, a magnetism, a rawness that existed in Tom because Tom was like him, whether either of them liked it, that was the truth. Tom was what Harry could have been if he had embraced the dark, if he had let those gentle hands that existed in obscurity touch his heart, then he could have become the things that Tom was. That feeling got Harry’s heart beating faster than it should, to know that such a thin line divided the good from the bad, was alarming, to say the least. To know that the simplest slip and he could have set the world on a completely different course through history. Whatever anyone may say to the contrary, that was power, and that felt good. 

Harry had uncovered the mirrors after just three days. In fact, he had gone farther, and looking back at it now, perhaps he had only encouraged Tom to him. He had brought more mirrors than the house really needed, placed them on every surface, and maybe most tellingly, across from his place at the table. Then he tried to pretend that his life was not changing, that he was not doing anything out of the ordinary. He still sat and watched the rain and the January sun, he still read books and made plans he’d never finish, but now he was distracted. Always looking into the mirrors, wondering if he would catch a glimpse of the feeling that he shared his house with.   
Tom took his time. But he did come back. He had sat opposite Harry one breakfast. Harry had held his breath and stared over oatmeal for too long. Just intrigued by this version of Tom, how he had the same fingers that curved together, the same way of tilting his head, the same way of half-smiling at something only he found amusing. Though there was something different about this version too, something skewered, off balance that warped the whole picture. This didn’t feel like a version of Tom he had known before, but neither did it feel like he was sitting eating oatmeal with a stranger.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So firstly I'd like to apologise, I wrote the first chapter of this in like an hour at 1am, and I hadn't really planned where it going next (literally just four vague bullet points). So when I sat down to write the next part, I just kind of let my imagination wreak havoc, and this was the result. Without trying to put you off it, it does go in unusual directions, as may be evident in the now updated tags (which are for the whole fic and not just this chapter). Anyway, that's just a heads up, feel free to abandon ship now while the goings good.  
> But, in good news, I do now have a direction for this fic, so there will be more updates, and I do hope it's not too bad.

It clicked a few days later when Harry had been staring into space and his mind had drifted back to that time in the chamber, what was different about this version of Tom. His single peculiarity, the one that had been hanging heavy and making him appear like a stranger, was that he was older. Not much older than he had been in the diary, but defiantly a little. There was a maturity in his eyes and a gravitas to him that no mere teenager would have been able to demonstrate. It wasn’t extremely noticeable, and Harry only caught flashes of it every so often, but it was there. Present in the way Tom sat so still across the table, his fingers not tapping as they had done in youth, and his eyes not roaming around the room, only staying poised, and Harry would almost say, predatory, on him. It was quite a hypnotic gaze, like a siren’s song with the power of a basilisk. It reminded Harry that the person who sat opposite him was not incapable even if they were only a reflection. For whatever Tom was at this moment, it was not weak, and it certainly wasn’t something held back by adolescence.  
Despite the fact, Harry too had long left childhood, and even adolescence behind, there was something about Tom that still made him feel young and inexperienced. Perhaps it was because the passions of youth had abandoned Tom, and had been replaced with calculations, intentions and designs. He radiated control. Purpose. Everything that Harry was so lacking, Tom seemed to have in great abundance, and he knew it.  
Every day when Harry watched him across the table, separated by a small expanse of wood and a box of cereal, Tom smiled with the corner of his mouth, like he knew exactly what Harry was going to do next, and had planned his reaction down to the minutest detail. It was a trend continued in whatever Harry did, if he was doing the washing up, Tom turned his head and examined the soap suds sliding into the sink; if Harry was just sitting on the doorstep watching the paper clouds float over the sky, Tom watched him and seemed to understand that this is what his life consisted of.

If Tom could speak, he didn’t. He only watched, eyes and mouth and hands expressive by themselves. He never once tried to explain what he was or what he was thinking, but Harry felt like he always knew, and regardless of whether Tom was really interested, he seemed to listen when Harry spoke to him.  
Harry wouldn’t deny, his loneliness had never felt quite so poignant until it was quelled. When that endless space had been filled, it suddenly felt _that_ much larger, and Harry missed everyone _that_ much more. Though none of those feelings were enough to make him leave, or even seriously consider the prospect. Even if he did feel lonely, Tom’s presence soothed it, until it no longer felt so crushing. Tom was a balm, cooling and calming. Never more so, than when the coy April sun showed itself and splayed through the bedroom window in the evening. When Harry would lie on his bed and feel it caress his face, Tom would balance on the end of the bed, in a way that seemed to defy every law of reflections, if there such laws. It was times like that when Tom’s gaze was so insistent, so far-reaching that it felt like his eyes were scraping Harry’s soul, that Harry wondered whether Tom had been watching him for a while. Whether that feeling in the air, the one that had now dissipated, had been him. If it was, why was it? What had made Tom crawl out from the woodwork and back into the world? Sliding and slithering between dreams and realities, between life and death, like a snake.  
“Why you?” he had asked the mirror, one day when he was drunk on the afternoon sun, “why of all the people in the world, do I see you?”  
The reflection, Tom’s reflection, if it could even be called that, just tilted its head to the side and gave a half-smile that explained nothing. Perhaps Tom did not know. Perhaps he did not care. All that was true was that Tom was here, sitting on the end of his bed, looking younger than he should with his crossed legs and fingers twisting at the duvet. The duvet real cover, at the end of Harry’s bed, didn’t move, and Harry couldn’t be bothered to work out why, after all his brain had never been made for working out the physics of things. 

Harry honestly wished he could ignore how the world suddenly seemed to be built solely around Tom’s existence. How he wormed his way into the fabric of Harry’s life until he was undeniable. It had started with the colours of spring, all the pinks and yellows and pale blues seemed to morph into greens and reds and greys. The sky was heavier, filled with churning clouds, and the grass seemed deeper and cooler to lie in. It was such a rich green that Harry could almost imagine it was the centre of an ocean, the place where it was at its deepest, and by lying in it he was somehow transported to a world where the birds that flew were fish that swam, and the breeze, an ocean’s current.  
Red also seemed to suddenly exist. Harsh red tulips stood out against the steel coloured clouds, and the blossom that fell beneath the apple tree seemed to rot into a rusted red that resembled the splatter of blood. Even the shadows seemed to be fuller and darker, like the very presence of Tom drew out the darkest things in the world. Not that Harry was complaining. He liked the springtime, the quiet buzzing of the bees on the breeze, and the shrill cries of a shrike in the brambled hedgerow. But there was a sameness that had always infected spring, a forced beauty, the new world for new life seemed overrated when in actuality it was rarely the beginning.  
This new beauty felt ominous in the best kind of way, a prickling against his neck as though someone was looking right at him, but he didn’t feel scared. Whatever it was, just filled him with an anticipation he hadn’t felt in a long time; it gave him a purpose and a reason to wake up and stare at the sky and wonder who was watching when all the time he knew.  
Another feature was the newfound presence of snakes. Harry had seen them curling through the grass. They were only grass snakes, the sort that was more cute than deadly, but their presence was unusual. Harry had watched Tom as he examined one that slithered right by the kitchen door, and he had come to the conclusion soon after that Tom was not like a grass snake. Rather, he was more similar to an ancient creature of ophidian origin, that humankind had assumed was long extinct. It wasn’t. That was obvious by the way that Tom was sitting on the kitchen tiles before him.  
Ever since they had first met, all that time ago, Harry had felt ophidian was the correct word to describe Tom, and now it seemed to fit him even more. There was a smoothness to his character, a sleekness and fluidity to the way he moved, that Harry had only ever seen replicated in the movement of a snake, as it slowly stalked its prey. Harry only hoped, and something in Tom’s eyes suggested he was right, that he did not count as prey. 

In those weeks that passed too quickly, Harry made many lists. Hermione had always said that it was a good way to gather thoughts, to organise and discover priorities. It helped, though Harry doubted she would be impressed with what he was deeming to be his priorities.  
The most pressing in his humble opinion was to discover what Tom was, preferably without involving anyone else because whilst that would have probably been the simplest way of doing it, Harry did not want to face the consequences of the likely case that Tom really was just inside his head. So instead, he found himself sitting with a bowl of cereal and the cold morning sun, writing lists about what the Tom he had known wanted, and was like.  
At first, it was difficult, finding a tolerable way to write genocide proved to be tricky, and as Harry fumbled over it, repeating it out loud, he could have almost sworn that Tom looked offended in the mirror. He certainly didn’t see him for the rest of that day, or any day that he added to that list.  
His undivided attention to that endeavour might have fooled people that he had tapped into some secret part of Tom that was still stuck inside his head. That, somehow, he had discovered the deepest secrets of Tom’s motivations, but he hadn’t. In a week, Harry had only come up with four things that he knew for certain Tom was. Tom was ambitious. Tom wanted to escape his past. Tom wanted to be someone. Tom wanted to live forever.  
Despite the sparsity of his observations, Harry was unreasonably satisfied with such an analysis. So sure, that it would help him understand why Tom was here. Why Tom watched him intently from the mirror by the door, not impressed but not actively motioning against him. Although he did not encourage Tom’s company, the loneliness did, the endless isolation pushing him towards whatever human company could be found, even if he thought it was most unsuitable.  
Sometimes when there was a fine sprinkling of rain covering the world, and everything just seemed cold, Harry would sit on the floor in the living room, his shoulder against the glass. Sometimes he was lucky enough to have Tom sit beside him, taking the place of his own reflection in what could have been horrific symbolism for what he was becoming, but somehow, the warmth of a shoulder felt like a comradeship.  
Finally, he had found someone who didn’t feel they owed something to him. He had not saved Tom’s life, if anything, he was the one to destroy it, but this Tom did not seem to harbour ill-will for that action, or for any action. He passed the days wandering between the mirrors, watching and sitting and reading. Taking embarrassing levels of interest when Harry realised, he was talking or humming, or, god forbid, singing to himself. Those were the times that Tom seemed to smile, bright and knowing from across the room, drinking in the sight of Harry before him. Sometimes, when Harry turned around quick enough, he caught Tom’s smile before he could expel it from his mouth, and what a smile it was.  
Although Harry had not had the direct pleasure, or rather displeasure of being at school with Tom, which he was sure must have been completely unbearable, he still knew, from the momentary glances he had been given, that Tom’s smile was a wonder. It was not, despite Harry’s expectations, a smile of arrogance, nor condescension, nor egotism. It was simply there, waiting at the corner of his mouth, passing no judgements upon him. It was as though it was merely Tom’s natural expression. Maybe it was? Harry could not profess to have known Tom in his youth, nor was there anyone left alive who would have known the real Tom, as opposed to that creature that paraded with his history.  
On an afternoon when it was raining and they were sitting side by side on the stairs, Harry had asked him his first real question.  
“Did you have friends, once?” he had asked, hoping but not expecting an answer from Tom’s visage. The reflection rolled its eyes and moved further down the stairs, away from him.  
“It was only a question, there was no need to be offended,” he’d said, moving down as well also that he could glare in a mirror at Tom, who glared back with a surprising amount of petulance for a dark lord. Not that this Tom yet resembled that creature. Of course, there was the same slipperiness, a shiftiness with undertones of dishonesty and cruelty that coloured every inch of him. Harry wondered whether it was just because he knew too many versions of Tom, that he was so wary of this one. Or whether deceit was just spun into Tom’s natural aura, an inherent product of his very specific personality traits. Qualities that leant themselves to monsters, to darkness and things that were unacceptable in civilised worlds. But also, those very qualities were what made Tom so attractive and so ugly. A perfect dichotomy contained within a single person. For ambition was the lover of heartlessness, a callousness whereby he would abandon those who could not advance him; a desire for freedom came with reckless abandon for what he had been; most damning of all though, was the need to be someone, _that_ walked arm in arm with ruthlessness, and a desire to do whatever it took to get what he wanted.  
Harry knew of those intimate pairings because he had felt them too. When he had wanted things, prayed and cried for them, he felt the other edge of the sword against his throat. The payment for the promise. The expense for the things that he had so badly wanted, because like Tom he knew he wanted to be free, though unlike Tom he was not searching for recognition. He did not want people to _need_ him, he wanted them to understand. To know that he had lost so that they could win, he wanted them to know that he was not, and would never be their hero. Tom understood that. At least that was the air he gave off, with his gentle corner-of-the-mouth smile from the bottom of the stairs. 

As the dark spring truly came into blossoming, Harry had become more vigilant, and he’d like to think more observant. He could recognise when Tom was with irritated him and when he wanted to be sociable. He’d learnt that Tom had three specific smiles: the knowing one, the friendly one, and one that Harry could distinguish from the others, but didn’t yet know what feeling it represented. That, as of yet, unidentified smile was his favourite though, it was warmer than the others, and not artificially so, genuinely warm on his face. It made his stomach swirl and his thoughts stray back to when he was younger, and the closest thing he’d felt to love was seeing Tom’s mouth form words.  
Not that this dissection of character truly _meant_ anything though, just that they had come into a sort of mutual cohabitation where they were both by no means, and absolutely satisfied.  
It was this newfound closeness that meant Harry could no longer deny the curiosity that was budding inside him like a peony flower. He had a great desire, and one that was only growing, to _know_ what Tom really was. To confirm that Tom was indeed _something_ and that he had not started to dip his fingers into the treacle-madness that he knew those who lived alone were more susceptible to. On more than one occasion, Harry had wracked his brains, trying to remember six years of schooling, to see if he had ever been taught anything that might explain such a phenomenon, or whether, whatever Tom was, was something entirely new and undiscovered. Harry wasn’t sure if he liked the latter idea. In some ways, he would rather be falling into madness than have to contend with the likely publicity of being the sole discoverer of a new magical wonderment.  
So almost every day, in what could have been described as a desperate hope, Harry found himself checking, and then checking again, for illusions and curses and spells and anything that could have been creating Tom’s perfect image in every reflective surface. As he did so, Tom stood in the corner and watched, leaning against the wall and seeming to say, _‘you won’t find anything.’_  
“I might,” Harry said, checking again. Though it was the same every time he looked. He always found nothing. Nothing aside that nightingale.  
It continued to sit on the fencepost, though when Tom was around it ventured closer to the house. Its dark eyes reminded Harry of Tom’s in a way he couldn’t quite explain. Maybe it was because they were so dark and full, so secretive and so human. So unlike the creature that Harry felt still lurked under Tom’s skin. Those eyes looked like they could answer any question, any riddle that was put to it; if only Harry knew how to ask the nightingale what he wanted to know.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had absolutely no intention of writing this, but I was freaking out over an exam and it just sort of happened. I hope it's not too bad.

The world all changed again when the last of the daffodils were dying and, in their place, the red ranunculus flowers were sprouting up from the green oceans of grass. For this was when Harry was sitting in the doorway, on the mat, watching the clouds lazily slide through the sky and feeling the coolness of the sun’s waves on his skin. It was at this holy time, as the clouds broke open for the glittering gold of heavens to spread their light across the dull fields, when the next chapter of his story, or perhaps it could be now be called an epic saga, began. At the time he had wondered briefly how he managed to court drama so perfectly, how he had so many dalliances with all the things that other people managed to avoid for their entire lives. But for him, danger and death and all the monsters of the world seemed to gravitate to him, he seemed to subconsciously call them and nurture them, and, in turn, they loved him. 

It had started as the whisper on the wind. The same cry that he had heard long before Tom’s image had stained through the mirror. That distant murmur that rang across the fields, dampened by the rain but never ceasing. At least, that was how it started, now it did not stop. The words that Harry couldn’t quite make out had become a constant hum, a buzz in the air like electricity gathering for a storm, it made his skin prickle and a tightness, he wouldn’t be able to explain to anyone, form in his throat. It was pure anticipation dripping from the air, and though he did not like to admit it, Harry could not help but think that it was Tom who must have been controlling it, whether it was his intention or not. For there was magic everywhere, at least he thought it was magic. It had that softness about it, that calming feeling as it brushed through the air and settled on his skin like snow. He asked Tom once if he too could feel whatever it was in the air. Tom did not even attempt to answer, no nod nor shake of his head, he only vanished again, back to wherever he went. The place he seemed to go more now. Harry suspected it was merely the spare bedroom, and he could check that if he liked, but somehow, he felt that that would invade Tom’s space, as though he was a real person who could be offended. So instead, their companionship, which was all Harry could think of to describe the apparent friendliness they shared, ended at the wooden door. Ended with him sitting opposite and staring, and Harry liked to imagine that on the other side, Tom sat in the mirror staring in the same sort of way. 

It was distinctly lonely without Tom. Harry wasn’t honestly sure, how Tom had come to be such a part of his world, but he had, and now that they were apart, however superficial such parting was, he felt more alone than ever. More empty, like a part of him, was missing from the world. He knew, because despite what people might say, he wasn’t stupid, that loneliness was fertile ground for madness. For hearing things that were not there, and feeling sensations curling through the air that simply did not exist. When he was especially tired, with dark circles from lying awake and staring at the mirrors for too long, the small nightingale that sat upon the fencepost seemed to call his name, though Harry knew it couldn’t possibly. In the evenings, when Harry was just sitting reading at the kitchen table, slowly lifting his fork so mechanically that he no longer tasted what was on it, the nightingale would sit on the windowsill, casting its shadow into the sink, and forever seeming to sing his name. When he looked up it closed its beak and somehow acted demure, it reminded him of Tom in its own strange way.   
That is when Harry realised that perhaps he should start to fear himself. Fear that madness was starting to take him by the hand, starting to grasp his fingers as he attempted to clamber from the darkest and most haunting depths of his thoughts. He knew in the rational part of his brain that this was not normal. That none of this was normal. And yet, Harry could not find it in himself to leave. Though, even _he_ could not make himself believe that it would not be for the best to go. For at least a week return to the city, to the world of civilisation, at least to check if Tom would follow. But, as he stared at the large suitcase up on top of the wardrobe, the one he had not used since he’d arrived ever so long ago, he knew he wouldn’t leave. He knew that he couldn’t leave. That the fear that he would lose the one genuine person that he had truly found since becoming a hero, was a too greater price to pay, even for mere mental stability. 

Perhaps it was foolish. In fact, there was no ‘perhaps’ about it, it _was_ foolish, painfully so, but he could not stop; nor did he want to. On the days, those rare days where he was rewarded with Tom sitting opposite him, Harry felt more content that he had in any time he could remember. There was just something calming about watching Tom, about admiring him as he stared at the clouds thinking that no one was watching. It was almost childlike, the wonder that Tom possessed for natural things. Maybe he understood that however powerful he could have been, nature would always be more so. That was more apparent than ever now.   
A storm _had_ to be brewing. You could feel it in the air, so palpable that it sat so heavy on Harry’s tongue when he stood watching the distance. Then there were the clouds, swirling and churning, dark, dark grey mixing with the last entrails of the sunset to create a rusted, intoxicating sky that was as intimidating as it was beautiful.   
Tom certainly couldn’t take his eyes off it. Harry watched him, leaning against the kitchen sink, as Tom stood right at the edge of the frame by the door, and just stared up at the twisting sky. Even when the last lights were fading and the chill of Spring was starting to creep through the cracks, Tom just continued to watch the sky, like it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He even had the audacity to pout and look offended when Harry closed the door.  
“It’s cold,” Harry had said, and Tom’s reflection just stared back at him, before he crossed his arms like Harry had seen toddlers do. It was a sharp reminder of how human this Tom was. How normal. 

Such normality was something that plagued Harry every night as he lay just trying to sleep. It was as though his mind could not connect how two people who seemed so fundamentally different could be one and the same. How someone like this Tom could become something like Voldemort? In his head, there was such a chasm between the two, such a breadth and depth, further than he could ever imagine, and yet it still felt wrong. It felt wrong because deep down, Harry knew this version of Tom was winding his way so slowly into his heart. He also knew, and this was the painful, horrible thing, he knew that he was tempted.   
Harry turned over, away from the mirror and towards the window. Tonight, there was so much dark that there was no distinction between the curtains that covered the night and darkness of the wall. It all just blurred into one great expanse of black. It was almost like he was drowning, like he was back to being fourteen and stuck in the cold and the dark of the Black Lake. Even now when he was certain was alone, the words repeated themselves over and over, just his name, a record scratched and on repeat. It should have been scary. And though his heart was beating, though he could feel the electric buzz of anticipation of his skin, Harry wasn’t scared. For the voice, the words, he recognised them. From where he could not remember when he was hanging on the edge of sleep, he just knew that he had heard that voice before. He knew its softness, he knew its smoothness, somewhere he had heard it before, but he could not remember where. 

The next day the rains began. Spring showers people would call it, a warm rain that fell soft and slow for hours at a time, until the grass was sodden with pools that looked like they led to alternate dimensions, and the whole landscape smelled both fresh and stale. At first, Harry had spent the hours watching the droplets of water slide over the red petals and drip into the newly formed pools. But it hadn’t been long before watching the grey became unbearable. Just a constant reminder of all the things he had tried to get away from. Just endless, endless grey. Cobalt clouds against an ash sky, the water hazing the landscape into a blur of flint. Inside, it was no better, for without the stream of the sun it was so dull, so empty, all the character drained away like the old dishwater.   
That was when his attention, and he was only half-conscious of it, had started to drift. To roam away from the world outside, and even the world within. To focus upon the single colourful thing that was left untouched by the rain. Tom was not infected by this cold disease. He was untouched by the world’s change, though, at the same time, he seemed to be different. So different. A calmness that had been there before has washed over him, and he sat so still across the room. Harry wanted to touch him. He really did. He wanted to feel something untouched by the damp and the grey. He wanted to touch Tom just for the sake of it. Nothing wrong, nothing untoward, just feel Tom’s fingers against his own, and softness of his cheek and the warmth of his lips. Harry turned away. More than turned away. He left the sitting room and went right out to stand alone by the kitchen’s open door. Not caring if the rain splashed him as it hit upon the ground, nor caring it cold licked his fingers and the damp burrowed down to his bones. All he could feel was that impending emptiness, that great cavern inside him of loneliness that had been growing ever since he came out here, and that he had just been ignoring and ignoring in the hope that it would go away. But Harry also knew that there was guilt mixed up in the walls of this cavern. Guilt for wanting someone so vile, guilt for wanting anything at all.   
And to make it that much worse, the voices were back, layering themselves over and over each other until it was a blur as loud as the rain. A thousand voices just slashing the air and making even the great, wide, sky seem devoid of oxygen. Seem so full of emptiness and painfully heavy on his shoulders. The bubbling of words mixing and mingling together in such a tangled mess. He tried to breathe, to take in the cold, cold air and just swallow it, swallow the buzz and the hum and all the noise in the world.   
The rain stopped, and with it, like threads untangling, the words converged, and a single sentence hung in the silence.   
_Have you missed me, Harry?_

When he turned around, Tom was standing at the other end of the kitchen, and Harry remembered that voice. It was the same one that had soothed his nerves in the chamber, the one that was smooth and cold, and as poisonous as liquid mercury. The one that Harry had spent nearly a decade with, just hanging on the very fringe of his life, constantly there whether he had realised it or not. It was Tom’s voice. It had always been Tom’s voice.   
_Have you missed me, Harry?_ It repeated, sounding so loud, though Tom’s lips did not move.  
Harry stayed silent. He honestly could not answer because he did not know if he had _missed_ Tom because Tom was a monster. Perhaps, as they stared at each other suddenly somehow strangers, Tom had not yet taken the face of a monster, but it was still inside him. The creature that no one could ever love lurked mere millimetres beneath his skin, but at the same time Harry had felt empty for so long. There had been something missing from his heart ever since Tom had left it, just a hole, an empty space that was so used to being filled.  
 _Have you missed me, Harry?_  
There was a touch more desperation, a touch perhaps even of fear in that voice then, a momentary lapse of confidence. Harry still said nothing. He could feel the rain so cold on his back, and the chill of the wind on his neck, and the darkness of Tom’s eyes, and their warmth.   
He would be a fool to say that Tom was not _missable_. For Tom was a rare mixture, a perfect concoction of all the attributes that made someone so _desirable. Magnetic. Attractive_. There was no denying to himself that he was attracted to the things that Tom was, to the things that he was apparently still. He always had been. The version of Tom that he had met all those years ago in the diary had been his first real crush, the first time he’d truly understood that there were other people in the world that could make his stomach flutter. Even when together they had been on the very needlepoint of death, Tom’s allure had been undeniable. The skill with which he had woven his words had been so sensual, so mesmerising, and dare Harry think it, it had been seductive in a way that twelve-year-old him hadn’t understood, and perhaps sixteen-year-old Tom hadn’t either. He wasn’t twelve any more.   
_Have you missed me, Harry?_ Tom said again, never taking his eyes off of him.   
Harry swallowed, and when he spoke, he tried to be slow and measured and controlled, and to at least, for a little longer, pretend that those fluttering butterflies had not returned to his stomach two-fold.   
“Yes,” he said.


	4. Chapter 4

Tom did not say anything, he just stood there, watching, with Harry watching back. The rain was still not falling and the whole world was silent, save for the pounding of Harry’s heart as it pumped blood in circles. He could almost feel it pushing through his veins, feeding every inch of him with oxygen. Too much oxygen. There was a throbbing all over him like Tom’s words had been thrown rocks that now sunk in his stomach. They were heavy. Harry swallowed, trying to focus again, to cut through the silence and see Tom, and only Tom. See him standing still and steady, just watching with those dark eyes that had seen decades more than his body let on. He was returning the gaze, and for once it did not hold his usual apathy, for once in his life, Tom appeared to care.  
Harry was the one to turn away. They couldn’t stay there forever, however much he never wanted to moment to move on, to have to face what had happened, because a line had just been crossed. It was thin and almost imperceptible before they had crossed it, but now that they had, the gap behind them had become a chasm, and there was no possibility of returning to what they had been before.  
_What are you doing, Harry?_  
Harry realised then, that he was just standing, staring at the wall, not even looking at the paint, just staring right through it and seeing nothing. His lips were moving, he could feel them trying to form words, but no words came. There were no words to express every single emotion that was tangling itself up like a ball of wool in the paws of a kitten inside him. There were simply too many strands to make a sense of, too many feelings none of which he had truly experienced before. Sure, once, a long time ago, he had felt fear and worry and expectancy, but that now felt so very, very long ago. The only way to truly describe it, was like the air had been sucked from his lungs, almost as though plants had grown so suddenly that there was no time to adapt, and now they drank up all the oxygen that he pulled into his lungs, and no matter how much he breathed in, they always seemed to take more from him.

“I’m making a cup of tea,” he said, the words cracking like glass suddenly getting cold. Tom nodded but made no move.  
Harry’s footsteps sounded so loud on the tiles as he walked mechanically across the room, seeing none of the things that he grasped, not the kettle, not the tap, not the door handle, not even one of the mugs as it slipped out of his hand. The porcelain shattered on the stone, and the noise cast him out of his visions. For a mere moment, there was a flicker in his mind that felt rather like Tom about to make a sarcastic comment but biting back his tongue to stop himself. Harry swallowed and bent down to the lower cupboard and grabbed one the large and oddly shaped, ceramic mugs that Luna had brought on her one and only visit. The shape was meant to better diffuse the flavour or something, promote a better lifestyle, Harry couldn’t remember, but nor could he focus. Stepping over the broken cup, he placed the new one on the counter and ignored Tom.  
Although he didn’t look, Harry could still feel Tom’s gaze, unbroken on his back, Harry had never felt more like the worms the nightingale hunted at dusk. Before now, he had never felt nervous around Tom, there had been no reason, for all that he was, Tom was not deadly. He could not speak, and he could not act, there was nothing at all that he could do that would threaten him, and even now, all that had changed were the words that Harry heard were confirmed to come from Tom. It did not mean anything. It was not world-changing, and yet Harry was still nervous. 

The kettle whistled loudly, the only sound in that silence. Harry’s hands shook a little as he poured the water into the mug, a little slopping over the edge and nearly burning his hand. He swallowed again, his mouth suddenly becoming a desert where not even the smallest lifeform could survive; and tried to steady his hand, and his breathing, and his thoughts.  
Somehow, he got to the table without spilling anymore, though maybe that was because he only filled the cup half-way. Tom sat opposite him. The next stage was beginning very much like the first. The two of them sitting across from one another, each waiting for the other to speak, to understand what was happening.  
Despite all the things that Harry had thought before, and despite all the moments that they had shared in the early spring, now it was all changed. Something that had started as a single drop of rain on his skin, had turned into a tsunami washing and washing over him until he was soaked through with Tom. Perhaps all the confusion came about because Harry could no longer fool himself into thinking that Tom was anyone other than who he was. There was no opportunity to see this Tom that he saw, as someone other than the Tom who had haunted his teenage years. The Tom that had torn at the world, breaking it open little by little until it all but fell apart. Now that Harry had heard his voice, he knew for a fact that somehow, that Tom and this one, were truly one and the same, whether he liked it or not. 

The air was heavy, damp and warm, and the rain had started up again. It fluttered down from the sky, still grey and still wet, and Harry held the mug tighter. None of this felt right, it was still too quiet, too controlled. This revelation should have had him bolting his bedroom to pack his bags and to leave and never come back to this place, but instead, he was sitting here calmly, holding his mug and staring at someone that had filled a void, he himself hadn’t known was there.  
“Hello Tom,” he said, for want of anything better. It seemed to be the best place to start, as though they were beginning again like they had been part of a time loop, a recording stuck on repeat, each time producing Tom in a different form, and Harry a little older and supposedly a little wiser.  
_Hello Harry._  
Tom’s mouth didn’t move, but the words were heavy in Harry’s head and out, just resonating over the walls and between the raindrops. Those words seemed to fizz a little, reacting with the corners of his mind that had not heard that voice in so long. It was beautiful.  
“Why are you here?” said Harry eventually, sipping his tea as something for something to do, because he couldn’t just do nothing. The tea was too hot, and it scaled his tongue.  
_Because you are._  
More silence. Harry stared at the tea, the steam sticky against his chin, wishing that this didn’t feel like an intimate conversation. “And you just couldn’t stay away, huh?”  
_I guess not._  
There was another wave of silence pulling them under, but not once did their eyes separate, and it felt like the first time again, like those first fifty-seven seconds that had left Harry’s eyes burning and his breathing on edge. The problem with it all though, was that it all felt too casual, like they had been friends before and not antagonists, like they had a past that mattered. They didn’t. Maybe, what this was, had been simply inevitable since the very beginning. No matter how many times Tom died before him, and he died before Tom, maybe they would always find their way back to each other. Perhaps, they were simply inevitable. 

Tom continued to watch him, and even when he was only sitting there across the table, smiling, he managed to still ache with a magic that old and crushing. Whatever, Tom was, and Harry still couldn’t find it in him to ask, was just as dangerous as it had always been, and more so now than before, because now Tom’s tongue was back into use. Now he could spin silvery webs like those that decorated almost every corner of this house, wrap flies in them and suck away their life. Harry hoped he was not a fly. But despite the power, which Harry knew was not alien to himself, Tom did not have the malice hanging about him that his later version had maintained. That creature that Tom would have become had not yet taken shape, and the only indication that it was there at all, was the glow to Tom’s eyes.  
Under the setting sun that forced a crimson hole in the clouds, like hell and heaven had interchanged, that colour was more visible than ever. But still, it could not yet be described as red, only a glossiness, the same sheen that finishes good quality rosewood. A richness and a glaze, like a thin coating of red-wine sauce, poured over roast beef. Maybe he should not have found it beautiful. Maybe Tom’s eyes should not have been so mesmerising in the half-light, but they were. Dark, tempting, and it seemed too clichéd to even think, but he wanted to drown in Tom’s eyes. Just leap forward and dive into them, feeling his body dissolve as he did so, and all his problems melting away into the dark. 

Harry swallowed. Those sorts of things were not the kind that he could tell people. They were not the sort that people would want to know. After all, what kind of monster did you have to be, to look at the very personification of wickedness and malevolence and say that you did not care? When he was younger, when he had last met a version of Tom that truly resembled this one, people could have forgiven him for having mixed feelings. They would have said that he was too innocent to know what badness, true badness, looked like. They would have said that Tom was manipulative, and Harry had an impressionable mind. They would have forgiven him. But right now, Harry was not young, he was not innocent, and he was not impressionable. Everything that he did was by his own free will, and that honestly made it so much worse.  
Although he would have loathed it with every inch of his body, Harry almost wished that Tom could, or would be forceful, that he would be violent and like his other self. That way, he could have felt the confusion that swam around his stomach, without the guilt that was growing like seaweed from every crack, always threatening to ensnare that diminutive desire that budded as a pearl in an oyster.  
“Do you remember?” Harry felt himself saying, more for comfort than for an answer.  
_Remember what?_  
“Dying?”  
No matter how many times he said it, to know that he had died, and that he had died willingly was still a painful thing to swallow. He, for the greater good, had chosen to step off the edge of the earth and find himself in perfect limbo. Death was lonely and, coming back was even lonelier. Looking back, it did not feel heroic or fearless or courageous at all. It was horrifying. Perhaps such momentary bravery had garnered for him, titles, rights to identifiers such as Master of Death. But, and as wrong as it sounded, it was what Harry felt, a Master of Death, should be its conqueror, not its friend.  
Tom was observing him in silence, watching like he knew his thoughts. Harry briefly wondered whether such magic would be possible without a body, but he could not bring himself to ask.  
_Do you remember?_  
Tom said eventually, head tilting to the side in that same old way, just waiting politely for an answer.  
The reply, that single word, scraped against Harry’s throat with all the rawness of sandpaper on sunburn skin.  
“Yes.”  
Of course, he remembered. Dying was not something that was forgotten overnight, or even a week, or a month, or a year later. There were still days where he could not bear to shut his eyes, in case, when he awoke, there was nothing but blinding light and old friends that he did not yet want to be reunited with.  
_Then I do too._  
The answer was unhelpful, irritating even.  
“We’re not the same person Tom, just because I’ve done something it doesn’t mean you have too.”  
_Actually, in most cases I did it first._  
The words were so calm that Harry felt a flush spill from his cheeks down his neck at for a moment having lost his composure. But he couldn’t help it, this whole situation was grating on his nerves, a mild panic combined with an anger that he knew was a product of all the things that he could articulate but were swirling through his head, just the spring blossom caught in the wind.  
“What?”  
_In most cases, where we share something, I did it first. I was an orphan before you, Harry; I lost someone before you did; I killed someone before you did; I died before you did._  
“I died before you, actually,”  
_When you effectively die seven times, it’s hard to be outdone._  
Tom said although he did not sound bitter as such, more amused, entertained by the way that his life had turned out.  
The light was truly fading now, and it cast long shadows across Tom’s face, dark streaks that did nothing other than highlight every angle, every feature that Harry so liked to look at. And together they sat for too long in that silence, only interrupted by the noise of the rain coming through the open window with the change of the wind, and the light banging of the shutter against the wall. 

For all their friendliness though, there was still one unanswered question that too was a shadow spread over the room, a pulsating mass that hooked itself into every corner, and dimmed the world. It was a weight upon Harry’s shoulders, stopped him from fully relaxing into all this. Those old defence mechanisms that he had been trying to remove for so long, pricked up when Tom shifted even the minutest distance, as though suddenly he would raise his wand and say those words and Harry would be intimately reunited with death.  
“Are you a horcrux?” Harry said suddenly, not really thinking until the words were already out of his mouth.  
_You destroyed them all, Harry._  
Came that smooth reply, Tom’s words slinking through the air, ever so charming, suave and slicked with just enough gloss that it felt suspicious.  
“Are you?” he repeated.  
_You would rather not know._  
“Stop avoiding the question, Tom.” Harry couldn’t remember feeling angry like this before, but then he supposed prior to Tom’s appearance he had had no one to be angry at. It had been just him and himself and the nightingale. It had just been him and the plants and the birds and the letters for so long that to have another person who was able to think by themselves was so foreign to him.  
“And of course, I don’t want to know, but I need to hear it, Tom. I need to know.”  
_You do understand that I’m not him. I might have shared his future once, but his future is over. Now all we share is a past, and I have significantly less of one than he did._  
“You didn’t answer the question.”  
Tom looked at him, face unmoving, eyes glinting, for a moment, that glamour of red seemed to spread, stretch like a membrane over his skin.  
_Perhaps I don’t know the answer_  
Tom said coldly.  
“Or perhaps you don’t want _me_ knowing,” said Harry, his palms now against the woods and his whole body leaning across the table, so that his face was only an inch from the glass. Despite the proximity, it was the first time that Tom seemed to relax. The stiffness that he had been holding himself with seeping out and diffusing around the room. He turned his head to the side.  
_Is that what this is, Harry? Are you afraid of me?_  
Harry swallowed, and he could feel that discomfort, that red now spread to his face. Hot embarrassment. Though still, there was something in the way that Tom said ‘afraid’ that made his stomach jump and twist and just feel so nice. So good. The perfect balance between threatened by him and reassured that everything Harry had liked about Tom, all those years ago was still inside him. Tom’s mouth stretched wider into a smile, and he raised a palm to the glass. Harry watched it. He saw every line and every groove, and he wanted to commit them all to perfect memory. To be able to lie awake in the darkness of his room, and remember what Tom’s looked like, and maybe, just maybe imagine what they would feel like if they touched his skin. Slowly, Harry raised his own palm and pressed it to the mirror, to Tom’s, seeking out that same heat that he’d felt before. Tom only continued to observe, that smile never leaving his face.  
_You are, aren’t you? You’re scared of me. But, at the same time, you don’t want to be._  
Tom paused, that smile now bordering on a smirk.  
_Well, don’t worry, Harry, I’m not going to do hurt you, I already tried that, and…_  
Tom’s eyes dropped from Harry’s, and instead dragged their way all over him, scraping across every inch until he was squirming just a little.  
_…apparently, I wasn’t very good at it, given that you’re still here._  
Harry couldn’t help himself smiling, even though it was inappropriate. It was such an honest response. Tom had spent Harry’s entire life in this world trying to extinguish him, and now they were sitting across from each other, being civil, and pretending that shared no past at all. It was quite a plot twist, and unfortunately, not one that Harry found himself horrified by.  
“What do we do now then, Tom?” he said quietly, still not moving away from the mirror.  
_What, indeed, Harry?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, usually I go too fast, but this fic is going really slow. If it’s annoying just let me know and I’ll try and make a little more happen in future updates.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To apologise for not updating for a while, here are two new chapters.

‘What they did now’ was a simple question, easily answered: they lived with each other. Some would have called it house-sharing, but the more perceptive would have called it a marriage of sorts. An understanding existed, unspoken, between them. They knew, somehow, that they were the only ones who could ever remotely _know_ what the other had experienced. Their lives were mirrors of each other, just as much as their bodies were now; a reflection back at them, showing them everything that they were, and everything that they wanted to be.  
The weather refused for reasons unknown to improve, and so a routine formed around them, rather like a cocoon, but less restrictive. Inside this moment, stilled by time, things were changing, as a caterpillar does in its chrysalis. Harry’s accusatory glances were the first to go, as he learnt that Tom was never going to answer the one question that remained unanswered, and if they were going to live with each other, he had to accept that ignorance was probably bliss. Tom in turn also made a concession, he ceased making spiteful comments, biting his tongue instead, and tapping his fingers against any available surface. Harry honestly wasn’t sure which was more annoying. But nevertheless, the world slowly went back to how it had been, before Tom’s tongue could wrap itself around him, until Harry never wanted it to let him go.  
During the days, they sat together, each across the room, familiarity exemplified in perfection. Harry suspected that in the quiet they both pretended that they were not watching each other, that they both read without reading, watched without watching. Well, he hoped that Tom was doing the same, otherwise, it was just sad, a crush let off the leash until it was lost in the emptiness.  
As he watched Tom, Harry had to think of how they completed each other, however crude it was to think such things. They were exactly what the other needed, and Harry had too many romantic thoughts to complement the impression. He wanted, somewhere in heart, to stand in the kitchen at midnight and dance along to the static on the radio. He wanted to lie in the middle of the day, his head on Tom’s shoulder, just talking about nothing. It was wrong, monstrous even. But there was a hole in Harry’s heart; a void, large and cold, hanging empty, so empty–  
_What are you thinking about?_  
Harry looked up. He’d been sitting at the table, staring for too long at a bowl of soup that had now gone cold. Tom was sitting opposite, watching intently with those malefic eyes.  
_So?_  
He prompted.  
“Nothing,” said Harry, silently grateful that Tom could not read his thoughts. 

That was the other thing that plagued them, unspoken words, unspoken feelings. Questions that neither would ask, nor answer. For both of them had gaps, great gaping holes in their timelines that the other could almost certainly fill, if they could only swallow their pride and bring themselves to ask.  
Several times Harry had felt that the question had been on the tip of Tom’s tongue, and the buzz of words had started in his head before cutting out as suddenly as the power in a lightning storm, and they were left in the silence. Tom clearly _wanting_ to know, but not wanting to stoop low enough to find out. If only Tom did not wear pride as such a crown, and Harry did not wear his own cloak of fear, then they could have been something truly special.  
Harry still held out hope though. Their time together was young yet, just a speck in history, not yet a point or a blot, merely a speck without substance or merit. There was still time to become something, even if it was less time than he would like. For as much as he tried to ignore the fact, there was no denying that one day, hopefully in the distant future, Harry would have to go back to civilisation for one reason or another. He would have to smile at Tom, and then walk away, close the door to the cottage, and close the gate and leave Tom all alone in the darkness again.  
Harry liked to pretend that that made his motives altruistic; that he paid such attention to Tom because he did not want anyone to be as lonely and lost as he had been. But deep down, in the darkest chasms of his heart, he knew his motives were entirely selfish in their nature. He knew that he did not want to walk away from Tom because _he_ himself, could not bear to live without him anymore. 

Whatever Harry tried to convince himself of, there was still something simmering under the surface between them, like the edge of a storm in the air. And every so often, Tom’s smile caught the light and it seemed to splinter the world, like a flash of lightning in the dark. That smile cracked the sky apart, as though it was as fragile as an eggshell, and dragged out something unfamiliar from the depths.  
Tom’s smile pulled out of him a feeling that Harry had not felt for a long time now, and honestly never really thought he’d feel again. But nor was it a feeling he wanted, for that emotion was liking, and liking would turn to loving if it was let to go to seed. And even Harry in all his calamitous recklessness understood that it was wrong to love a monster.  
He couldn’t help but think that life would be so much easier if Tom hated him. If what they were living was not the dreamlike reverie that it had been so far, but a nightmarish vision; then, these intense feelings could have been played off so easily. If only they tormented one another instead of tolerated.  
Secretly, Harry wished that his life was defined by death hanging a constant threat over him, built on knives held to his throat and scratches found in his legs in the mornings. He wanted Tom to hate and to hurt, for him to be vicious with his teeth and his nails, and to find a way to make Harry bleed or choke or drown. Then, if that were all true, the infatuation that had grown from his own negligence could have been justified to those who would have been horrified. Simply put, hate was easy, and love was not. 

Despite the continuing rain and bitter, uncharacteristic cold of the nearing Summer, Harry continued to go out almost every other day to reposition the bird feeder that he’d given into buying. He’d watch it, from the kitchen as he did the washing up, watching and waiting, watching and waiting. And when dusk fell, his waiting was rewarded by the presence of the nightingale.  
It swooped down from the trees, where Harry supposed it slept, and in the half-light, with the pink-grey glow on the horizon, it sang for him.  
Though Harry always called him, Tom never saw the nightingale, he just wasn’t around when it was, although he maintained that he had seen it in casual passing. He had apparently seen it feed on the seeds on the bird feeder, and seen it patter through the waterlogged grass, pecking occasionally at what was left of the soil.  
When they talked of the curious little creature, Tom always said that, as a subspecies, they were sad birds; mourning birds whose laments were timeless. They sang for sad times and for sad people, and only came forth when they could sense holes in someone’s heart. Harry preferred to think of them as muses, as creatures that were divine. 

_Do you think that the bird will guide you?_  
Said Tom suddenly, from the chair he had claimed as his. He had stopped reading and was now watching Harry, paying him his full attention, as opposed to the usual half-hearted courtesy he typically gave.  
_You think that bird is the answer to all your life’s questions._  
He said, rephrasing and with more certainty this time.  
“It’s better than seeing it as a sadness. That’s all it is to you, a lamentation for a time you can’t remember,” said Harry.  
He hadn’t been talking about the nightingale today, not really, just a passing comment that he saw it standing alone the night before, just staring at the moon. But, in their short time together, he’d always found Tom’s conversation topics to be somewhat random, so he indulged him.  
_You think the bird is like me, don’t you?_  
Harry found himself narrowing his eyes, mildly suspicious, not to mention, unsure where this conversation was supposed to be heading.  
“Perhaps,” he said, “but don’t _you_ think it resembles me? Making us equal?”  
Tom smiled now, with both his eyes and his mouth.  
_It’s sad, and so are you, inside._  
“Exactly, that’s _all_ you see in it.”  
Tom ignored him, and instead, continued with his own line of thought.  
_Does that mean you think that I’m divine._  
“I never said that,” said Harry carefully, as far as he could remember he’d never mentioned his exact thoughts on the nightingale to Tom.  
_You were talking your thoughts aloud._  
Tom explained,  
_You think the bird is divine, and you think I am like the bird, so I must be divine too._  
Tom looked far too pleased with himself, and Harry rolled his eyes. He still didn’t remember saying that he thought it was divine aloud, but his memory had always been bad. Here, days blurred into one another, distinguished only by conversations with Tom and the colours of his own clothes.  
“At least don’t keep calling it ‘the bird,’” he said, trying to change the subject to something more neutral.  
Tom only continued to smile. 

It had to be a twisted form of masochism that Harry subjected himself daily, just watching Tom from across the room. More times than he was prepared to admit, Harry had sat with a magazine he wasn’t really reading, just watching Tom as he read.  
Harry did not pretend to understand how this mirrored world seemed to work because it did not appear to have any rules. Tom could not touch the things in Harry’s world, that much was clear, he was stuck behind the glass like a mere figment of Harry’s imagination; a fact that he preferred not to dwell on. Instead, taking on the assumption, that Tom was real, as truth, after all, there was no obvious reason that that was not the case. Nevertheless, Harry did not understand that world behind the glass, and if Tom did, then he did not share its secrets.  
Tom rather preferred just to sit in a chair across from Harry, the one that was _his_ and read. And Harry preferred to shamefully watch him. Watch how he licked his lip every so often, and then licked the pad of his finger with the tip of his tongue and slid the page over.  
Harry should not have wanted to be that page. He should not have wanted to feel Tom’s hands on his shoulders, he should not have wanted them to trace down his spine. The thumb pressing against the ridges, feeling every bone that made them the same, however much they both might try and deny it. But he did want those things.  
There was more that Harry found himself wanting, too. Thoughts that made him blush when Tom looked over with his lightning smile and seemed to know his thoughts. What had started off as an innocent attraction, had swelled and mutated, until now it was a chasmic, festering, fascination. This new enthrallment with Tom’s very existence was far less virtuous than it had been before, far less innocent. Harry still wanted to touch Tom’s fingers, to count them and slide his own between them, but now too did he wanted to kiss them and taste them too. Now he wanted to feel the press of Tom’s fingers on his tongue, and the scraping of his nails in the corners of his mouth.  
There could be no denying that the things that bubbled up inside Harry were less than honourable, but they were still just as beautiful. They gave him the purpose that he had lost, and he so desperately wanted to fulfil it.  
To take Tom’s mouth against his own, and to fill that emptiness that must hang inside him, a great, empty space where his soul should be. How that space must hurt, how it must ache, how relief on it would be so sweet.  
If he was allowed to think uninhibited, Harry would admit that he wanted to pour himself into Tom and have Tom return the gesture, until they were blurred together, a beautiful blend of emptiness and satiety; a melange of loneliness and companionship. The simple and perfect demonstration of what happens when suffering, at the jaws of thing inside of them, was turned into power of their very own to wield.  
But those thoughts were reserved for the haze of the evening, when his ideas began to blur together, and the memory of something that had never happened fell heavy on his lips.

So, it came to be that Tom’s eyes on his were Harry’s first waking thought, and Tom’s mouth against Harry’s own was his last waking thought. He’d lie for hours on the cusp of sleep, that soft haze curling around him, taking the form of light and colour splayed out across the darkness.  
When the sky outside his window was stained black, coated only with a sheen of stars, and a moon hanging so low and so bright, Harry wondered whether Tom would be warm or cold to touch. He wondered whether his fingers would feel like twigs of ice against his skin, or whether they would possess the heat of someone who was still alive, or perhaps, they would be so much hotter. Perhaps they would burn holes in his arms as Tom held him, melting his flesh until his imprint could never be worn away. Harry would like to find out.  
And he did, in a way, when the mist of the morning filtered in. Through the curtains, a veil of light passed by, caressing the walls and the covers and finally Harry’s skin. Although it was muffled by the clouds that clung like a chronic sickness to the sky, the sun’s rays still held some warmth. A gentle balminess that was pleasant to awaken to.  
In his half-awake state, Harry imagined that the sun’s gentle caresses were really those of Tom’s lips against his own. That the two of them were lying in bed together and sharing the sort of kiss that was reserved for romantic mornings for couples whose love still felt real.  
The dream was shattered by a bird knocking against the glass. Harry’s eyes shot open and his face flushed as the bright as the peonies that hugged the walls.  
The one striking thought though was for the mirrors that lined his room. Although Tom was usually good with not entering the bedroom without permission, he wasn’t perfect, just as Harry wasn’t. More than once he had opened the door to Tom’s ‘room’ without knocking, and Tom had always refused to appear until he apologised.  
Tom was not in his room now; it was just Harry and the grey-gold of the sun. 

Harry left the room, left the house and stood outside where Tom could not come. The sky was still dark and a rain that was cold still fell. Though the droplets were finer, like a vapour that wrapped itself around him, chilling Harry right down to the bone. He should have returned to the house, but he didn’t.  
Rather, he stayed out in the rain stained gold by the sun and imagined that the drops of water that slid down his face were Tom’s fingertips. That it was Tom’s fingers which ran from his forehead to his cheek, and then from his cheek to his jaw, before dripping from his chin in a gentle stream. In part of his imagination, Tom’s fingertips were so cold from decades of being alone in that silent abyss. They held him so gentle, shaking a little as they traced between the waterways.  
The other part of his imagination believed that those fingers would be warm. Life was granted to that fantasy when a glimmer of the yellow sun appeared for just the briefest of moments. When those beams of light touched his lips, Harry couldn’t help but believe that its warmth was Tom’s lips on his own. That he was a living, breathing being, and they really could kiss in the rain like long lost lovers, who’d found each other again.


	6. Chapter 6

Harry tried not to think of Tom, instead, he threw himself into other activities, other people, and that was how he noticed that, despite the persistently poor weather, he was living less and less for the letters from his friends than ever before. When they came now, because they did still come, it was not joy that filled him, not excitement, rather regret, and then guilt for feeling like that. It was a strange mixture that tugged his stomach in far too many directions, tore it apart little, and Tom seemed to notice. How could he not when they lived in such close proximity?   
Now, whenever a letter came, Tom would keep his distance, stand across the room, or not in the room at all, just waiting for it all to be over. Harry noticed that as soon as he had written the reply, and it sat on the table waiting to be delivered, then, and only then, did Tom return to his usual self. Harry guessed the behaviour stemmed from the same reason that he himself felt tense whenever there was a letter in the house. For the letters were reminders of the real world, and both of them wished for such reminders to recede like the oceans back into the depths, and allow them to live their pleasant fantasy for a while longer. Though for all their pretending, they knew that soon would come the time when they would have to admit what this was becoming.   
They would have to stand on opposite sides of the kitchen and have conversations that no one wants to have. They would have to admit to each other, that there was something serious in their stares, something hot and dark, dangerous and meaningful. At least, that was what Harry saw in the perpetual gazes of longing that seemed to linger between them.   
Personally, Harry knew exactly what he was feeling, that this was the painful buds of love, and if they were not nicked at the base, then they would grow to flowers, and his heart would have to endure the twisting and tugging of being in crisis. Harry knew because he had felt those feelings before, but whether Tom would recognise, or even understand the feeling was an entirely different question if he even had even experienced at all. 

The letter that arrived today was the worst one yet. Lovely handwriting from Hermione and affection from both of them; for a while, Harry had pretended that he had not noticed that they had started to write joint letters, but after a while, he’d had to inquire.  
He was happy for his friends, happy that they were happy; happy that they wanted him to be happy. But it was also an excuse not to go back, knowing that it _them_ now, not that that was bad, just different. They had found what they were looking for in the darkness; a love that was slow and beautiful, taking years to mature but blossoming at last as the most beautiful they would ever experience. He was happy that they had finally, truly found each other. But they could not help that _he_ was still searching, _he_ was still lost in the dark, and though sometimes it felt he was emerging, he had not yet found his way out of the maze that constituted as his mind.   
They said they wanted him to come back, for Percy’s engagement party, though they barely mentioned Percy, and did not say the name of his fiancée; they just wanted him to come home. _Home_. They did not feel like home anymore.  
 _Are you going?_  
Harry started. He’d been sitting, or rather, curled up in one of the chairs in the living room. The one that stuck close to the wall and was that little bit cosier than the others. It also had a mirror behind it that Harry had forgotten about, but apparently, Tom had not.   
“Don’t read over my shoulder,” he said, clutching the paper closer to his chest, though Tom had probably already read it twice through by now, and committed it all to his perfect memory.   
_You didn’t have to read it here._   
“And you didn’t have to read my private letters.”  
Tom just shrugged and swept to the other side of the room, taking the seat opposite.  
 _Are you going?_  
He repeated, his head tipping to the side as it always did when Tom was asking questions, he knew he shouldn’t. 

“No,” said Harry getting up, and walking away, hoping that it might indicate the conversation was over. Tom, apparently, did not get the message and just followed him, like a cat determined to condemn its owner for a certain failing. Tom might have resembled a snake in many respects, but he was also rather catlike, and not always in the best way. He had the same mercurial moods, not to mention the same malign general intentions. Harry also suspected though that Tom would not appreciate the comparison, however true it might have been, so he did not say it, he merely thought it as Tom followed him into the kitchen.   
The door was still open, and the chill was sliding through in a cold ocean current. The rain continued, though fresher than before, no longer was a storm brewing, this was just spring rain in all its beauty. Harry stood in the doorway, feeling the coolness and dampness on his face. The floral fragrance of the garden could just be detected, dampened considerably by the rain, so much so that if it were to stop, the scent would probably be overwhelming.   
He felt Tom’s presence before he saw him, standing across the room, exactly like he had imagined.   
_Why aren’t you going?_   
He said, quietly, almost like a chiding parent when a child refuses to be polite for no reason at all.  
“Because I don’t want to.”  
 _They’re your friends, aren’t they?_  
“I don’t want to go, alright, Tom.”  
Tom tipped his head to the side again, and Harry couldn’t help but notice how his fingers tapped on the back of the chair’s reflection. Although the action produced no real sound, Harry could hear it, in his head. That disapproving tapping, and that curiosity, that need to understand why someone would not want to return to the people that made them most happy.   
Harry could not bear to look at him, and instead, returned his gaze to the greyed sky. He did want to think of his reasoning, of that fact that he would rather spend time with Tom, just sitting with him than returning to his friends, and having to tell them that he did not intend to stay.  
He wrote back to say he would come for the wedding, but not the engagement. 

On the day that all his friends were probably dancing and laughing and living together, Harry was lying on his bed, watching the dark as bled through the open window and into the bedroom.   
The rains had stopped earlier, and now a thousand scents of early summer swirled in the air; the most gorgeously noxious perfume known to man. It stung the sky and curled around everything until it was enveloped in an invisible mist that smelled of flowers, that reminded Harry of forgotten times. Short moments where happiness had fallen upon the earth like rain, and good things had grown from the soil. This was not those times, but this was closer to them than Harry had ever managed to get before.   
Lying on his bed, breathing in the floral scent as it drifted through the window on a dream, was perfect, and the fact that Tom was there too, sitting on the edge like he always did, only made it better. It would appear that he could not smell the flowers, but he listened with interest as Harry did his best to try and describe the fragrance of the gods. He even had the decency to smile when Harry’s words failed him and the comparisons that he made were hazy, useless things that had made sense in his head, but not when they were spoken aloud.   
Perhaps it was because of the time, and perhaps they should have cared that it was passing midnight, that the clock was ticking with an increasing desperation that they should sleep. But Harry did not want to sleep. He wanted to lie here forever, between the scent of flowers he couldn’t name, and the softness of the duvet against his bare feet. He did not want to sleep, to close his eyes and think of all the things that he should have been doing on this night.   
So, he lay back and watched how even Tom, despite sitting in his usual place, was slightly more relaxed. The straightness, gone from his back, now unafraid to show the lazy curves of repose. They suited him more than Harry would care to admit. That softness; features sanded down, sharpness replaced by smoothness; the faint glow of the warm light shadowed over his face in a way that was romantic, as opposed to threatening.   
Tom seemed to know that he was staring, but he said nothing, he did not even shift, he just continued to watch with those warm eyes and that little half-smile that made Harry’s stomach dance all by itself.   
“Have you ever been in love?” Harry found himself asking, the words spilling out before he could stop them, encouraged by the stillness and the laziness and the scent of flowers that made his head heavy. 

Harry half expected Tom to leave, to vanish back to the void, behind those closed doors that meant much more than they merely seemed. He expected Tom to run away because _these_ were the questions that Tom didn’t like. The ones that Harry would almost think that he was scared of if Tom was scared of anything.  
But Tom did not leave. He stayed perfectly still, watching with his head to the side. He was thinking. So, Harry mimicked him, staying perfectly still, with his head to the side, watching him also.   
_It depends how you define love._  
“That’s a terrible answer and you know it.”  
 _Only because you don’t like it._  
Harry smiled and leaned his head back on the pillow to stare at the ceiling, that darkness like a void hanging above him, dotted with stars made of Tom’s words. Of course, Harry did not like the answer, but it dripped with Tom’s signature ability to never answer anything, and so he liked it for that.   
“I don’t know how to define love to you, but does anyone, really?”   
He looked up, and Tom was watching him carefully, head no longer to the side, but eyebrows furrowed a little, and his teeth resting just on the edge of his lip, as though he was going to bite it.   
“But I suppose love is meant to be – butterflies in your stomach and a tightness in your throat and a burning in your heart.”  
 _Sounds unpleasant._  
“I think it’s meant to be.”  
They were silent. Just listening to the sway of the breeze as it ran through the grasses and the leaves, its fingers brushing on the walls of the house. Harry closed his eyes to the void, and the dark, and Tom. Of course, Tom wouldn’t like love, that was his nature he supposed: cold and covered in thorns, his centre never to be touched because whatever was inside it, was to him, somehow a form of weakness. He closed his eyes and tried to smile; so that he would not cry for the things that Tom could not help; when Tom could still see. 

When Tom did not say anything, Harry sat up, blinking away any water in his eyes, and stared out the window, his fingers holding onto the frame, chilled a little by that breeze. Outside the darkness was crushing, pressing in on itself and threating to tear its very self apart from the inside out. The darkness was like Tom, and if Harry was willing to admit it, like himself also. Neither of them liked people to get too close, for fear that something inside them would poison the love that people gave them. They both had darkness lurking like animals beneath their skin; rabid creatures that were scratching to be let out. Monsters that stretched and threatened to tear through their skin and reveal all that they were to the world.  
Harry did not want to think of that, of those similarities that were probably more problematic that he was prepared to admit, either to himself or to others. Out there, the darkness seemed too cold now, close and almost claustrophobic in its intense black. So, he turned away, back to the warmth and safety of the room.  
It had changed though, the air shifting and a new sensation that Harry could not identify seeping through the cracks. Tom was sitting closer. His legs crossed, fingers playing with the duvet. In that moment, he was terribly childlike, just a boy with something inside him that was so dark, he was scared that if he embraced it, then he would get lost in it. Just a boy so afraid of the monsters that were inside him, threatening to eat him alive.   
_I think I might have been in love once._   
He said, so quietly that it was almost mumbled. Harry swallowed, that horrid thing called hope bubbling up to the surface again.   
“With who?”.   
_You wouldn’t know their name._   
Came the reply, and with it, the silence crept from the crevices again, and the only sound was its claws scratching the walls with that high-pitched whine that neither of them heard, because they were too busy watching each other.  
“How old were you?” Harry asked so quietly, so as not to disturb that silence as it slunk across the ceiling, lest it should fall and swallow them both.  
Tom raised his head with a smile   
_Same age as you, at a guess._   
“That’s nice,” he said, not meaning it.  
 _They’re dead now._  
Said Tom, apparently sensing Harry’s newfound apprehension. It was such a simple statement, and Harry wondered how it must feel to say something like that, before remembering that he knew exactly what it was like to have dead friends.  
 _But what about you, Harry, you never told me if you’d been in love._  
It was Harry’s turn to smile. To feel all the painful thoughts swim away, and to sit down on his knees and smile properly, and shake his head because he’d never been in love, at least, not a love he could speak about with Tom. That particular love was swelling unnaturally with every smile until it threatened to swallow his heart whole, to swallow _everything_ whole.  
“No. Fleeting attractions perhaps, but not love.”

_Pity._   
Tom said, his face suddenly serious.   
Though that was what he said, there were words left unsaid, feelings laid thick as the scent of flowers in the air, but just as imperceptible to the human eye. Harry did not know what it was that compelled him, but something made him shift, creep forward across the bed on his knees, to the mirror, hanging on the wall. Tom did not move. He only raised his hand to the glass, in a gesture that certainly must have crossed mere familiarity by this point.   
_You haven’t asked why I think it is a pity that you say you have not felt love._  
He murmured quietly, and Harry could swear that he almost felt the heat of Tom’s tongue, like the words were pushed through the air towards him and were not pressed straight into his head.   
“Why is it a pity?” Harry said, touching his own hand to Tom’s, and feeling the familiar warmth, the familiar shape, and ignoring the shaking inflection that clung to his own voice.  
 _Because I thought you loved me._  
Harry should leave, he should step away and end this entire conversation, this entire interaction, but like the first time, he couldn’t, because, although, Tom _was_ magnetic; attraction was a two-way phenomenon, and Harry was already waist-deep in its waters.   
_I’m never wrong about people, Harry._   
Tom continued, still holding his eyes as closely and as tightly as he had the first time they had spoken. Deep down, Harry knew he should just go. But he couldn’t, he was stuck, staring, his hands feeling too hot against the glass, and his heart beating like a nightingale trying to escape from its cage.   
_And it’s a shame, because I was just starting to love you too._

Time slowed, until all Harry could hear was his own blood sliding through his own veins, his own heart throbbing, and a silence that was deafening. He stared ahead, seeing nothing but the colours of Tom’s eyes this close; the molten honey that curled like snakes around the centre of the iris. They felt like they were coiling around him, squeezing his lungs together, killing him exquisitely. Harry dropped his eyes away because Tom’s hurt too much to look at, burned, almost like they could see right into his soul, and they wanted to eat they found inside him. As though, he really was a snake, and Harry himself was nothing but a hapless mouse, now destined to fulfil its obligation in the food-chain and be swallowed by the dark.   
_Do you love me, Harry?_  
The words were coming from far away, echoes underwater, resonances that came from the darkness and spread across the fields like a swarm of bees, and like the pollen they collected, the words spread slowly through his body; dispersing, diffusing, dissolving. But whatever connections that should exist in Harry’s brain, the ones that would let him speak, had simply broken, and he was left there, lips moving but no words forming behind his teeth, just his tongue flopping like a hopeless fish.  
There were simply no adequate words to answer that question, because this feeling was more than words. It was actions melted into emotions and twisted into something hot and beautiful that stung his stomach. Perhaps, that was why words failed him, and why Harry did what he did. Perhaps it was that absence of viable description that compelled him forward, leaning so close to the mirror, his eyes back watching Tom’s, dissolving into the gold and the bronze until he was swimming. In that sudden moment of confidence when his subconscious held sway, Harry moved, so close that his breath misted the mirror, and he could press his lips to the glass and feel the burn of Tom’s lips against his own.


End file.
